Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ......... nu 93 that chunk of Oxford Road

Now, I know we haven’t lost Oxford Road, but bits of it have been so transformed that it is as if it never existed.

The stretch in question ran from Charles Street almost down to the fly over and backed on to Upper Brook Street.

In all there were fourteen streets and countless houses which were all swept away so that the BBC could have a new broadcasting centre here in Manchester.

The lost streets included Pritchard Street, Hesketh, Leigh and Saville Streets and along with the houses there had been a school and a pub.

Planning permission had been granted in 1968 and after a hiccup building began in 1971 was finished in 1975 and the place was home to the BBC until 2011.

I first wrote about the vanished community three years ago, and at the time residents responded with their memories, but back then all I had to fall back on were old maps, street directories and census records.

Happily all that has changed, and these two pictures offer up a view as it looked in 1963.

It is one that I never knew and I bet many other people will be surprised at just how different it was.

In the background there is no mistaking the Refuge Building and Central Ref, but what fascinates me is the range of shops and residential property so close to the city centre, including a UCP café and snack bar, along with Ash of Ancoats, with its old fashioned shop displays which appear to have worked on that old maxim of “pile them high and sell them cheap”.

I could go on, but the detail is there to see, from the Didsbury bound bus to the woman wearing a university scarf, back in the days when students wore such things.




Location; Oxford Road,

Pictures; Oxford Road, 1963,  "Courtesy of Manchester Archives+ Town Hall Photographers' Collection",
https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/albums/72157684413651581?fbclid=IwAR35NR9v6lzJfkiSsHgHdQyL2CCuQUHuCuVr8xnd403q534MNgY5g1nAZfY

*Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ......... nu 56 the vanished fourteen and the story of the BBC, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2016/10/lost-and-forgotten-streets-of_5.html

Mr and Mrs Heywood’s fine house ...... pushing back the history of Edge Lane

Looking towards Chorlton, with Heywood's house on our left, 1914

There will be someone I know who has the answer to the mystery of those two houses on Edge Lane which stood between Longford Park and Alderfield Road.

Mystery is perhaps over egging it a bit but they are there on the maps from the 1890s appear on the rate books for 1863 and will have been demolished well within living memory.

Now I can be pretty sure that they date from 1863 and the first residents will have been Mr & Mrs  Heywood who occupied the house beside the park and Mr John Bury who lived in the adjoining property.

The Heywood family can be tracked to Didsbury in 1851, Stretford a decade later and so I guess the move just across the boundary into Chorlton made sense.

Our two houses and a few more, 1893

Given that they were in Stretford in 1861 and the rate books show them on Edge Lane two years later I rather think they were the first occupants.

And it was an impressive house consisting of thirteen rooms, set in its own grounds and  with commanding views across open land to the north and south.

Mr Heywood variously described himself as a Land agent and Commission Agent who left his wife Hannah sufficient money for her to style herself as of “private means.”

And there is no doubt the family were well off.  In 1851 at the age of 38 he described himself as “retired” and on his death in 1874 left his wife Hannah £7000 and when she died in the November of 1911 she in turn left £12987.

Looking towards Stretford, 1914

All of which put them in good company for the other residents of the grand houses which stretched back towards the village were equally well off  describing themselves as professionals and merchants and living in properties which commanded rateable values of  up to nearly a £100 in the mid 1860s.

These represented what could be described as the first development boom, preceding the one that transformed the area around the Four Banks by almost 20 years.

In part I suspect it will have owed a lot to the arrival of the railway at the bottom of Edge Lane in 1849 which provided these people of plenty with a swift route into town and allowing them also to live in what was still a rural community.

One of the grand houses on Edge Lane and Alderfield Road ,1959

But a century later these grand homes were too big for modern living and they fell to the cheap jack developer who carved them up into bed sits or wiped them away altogether.

After all the the foot print of a house like ours along with its garden could accommodate a large block of flats with space left over for a car park

Happily those that survived have either been converted into more stylish flats or returned to single families.

Sadly ours were torn down.  I am not exactly sure when, but in 1969 the home of Mr and Mrs Heywood was occupied by a James Ashcroft while its neighbour had been subdivided.

So it will have been after that but when is as yet unclear.

On the other hand as so often happens someone  well pop up with the answer.

We shall see.

And within hours of posting the story Peter Thompson, commented that "the Alderfield Road flats were built in 1973. I worked on them as an apprentice painter and decorator aged 16, my first ever job."

And that I am guessing is just the start.

Additional research by Andy Robertson   

Next; some of the other fine homes of the people pf plenty on Edge Lane a century and ore ago

Pictures; looking north along Edge Lane with the Heywood house behind the wall to our left, 1914, Identifier m17758 , and looking towards Stretford, 1914, m17758, Edge lane north east junction with Alderfield Road, A E Lander, 1959, m17783, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and detail of Edge Lane in 1893 from and the OS map of South Lancashire, 1893, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

The lost Eltham & Woolwich pictures ...... no.6 working the river

A short series on the pictures of Eltham and Woolwich in 1978.

For four decades the pictures I took of Eltham and Woolwich in the mid ‘70’s sat undisturbed in our cellar.

But all good things eventually come to light.

They were colour slides which have been transferred electronically.

The quality of the original lighting and the sharpness is sometimes iffy, but they are a record of a lost Eltham and Woolwich.

Now the series is entitled Eltham and Woolwich but I did stray into Greenwich, and someone has pointed out that the image is Greenwich.  I can not remember, so I guess there will be a lively debate as to exactly where I was.  I hope so.

Location; Woolwich or Greenwich

Picture; Woolwich or Greenwich circa 1978, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Days I remember ….. shopping in Chorlton 46 years ago

I don’t do nostalgia.

But here are four pictures of a day on Wilbraham Road on a winter’s afternoon in 1979.

It was a time when Chorlton still offered that traditional range of shops which would have been familiar to people a century earlier.

Now, I know today there is an excellent fresh fish shop on Wilbraham Road which is always busy.

Back 46 years ago I never visited In Shore Fisheries, and I can’t remember when it closed, nor can I work out if it turned into that chain of fish shops under the banner of MacFisheries.

But I did call into the cooked chicken shop regularly and rather think it continued to do the biz of all things chicken into this century.

All of which is a lesson to anyone interested in history which is always record what you see because there will be a moment when it has gone.

So, no nostalgia, just a bit of our past.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; on Wilbraham Road, 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

 

The unremarkable reveals its secrets ...... at Chorlton station in 1911

This is one of those pictures which don’t get included in the collections of Chorlton.

And you can see why of course.  There is nothing here at first glance which anyone would recognise so there is no point in trying to match it with the present.

Nor do we know who any of the four are and given that the photograph is over a hundred years old I doubt that we ever will.

So most of us would pass over the image and if pressed would label it “four men outside a brick hut, possibly industrial, date unknown.”

For me that is pretty much the attraction.  The date is given as circa 1909 and we are down at the Goods Office by Chorlton Station.

And with that small piece of detail the photograph begins to make sense and I think  starts being interesting.

Look closely and to the left there is a carriage no doubt waiting for someone off the train, while directly in front of the hut is the Public Weighing Machine and to the right the offices of the coal merchants.

In 1911 there were five of them working from the yard by the railway line along with J. Duckett & Sons, building merchants, and J. A. Bruce Alexander, nurseryman.

We may even be able to date more accurately when the picture was taken because according to the 1911 directory one of the firms working in the yard was a Frank Tinker and it is his name which appears above and on the office to our immediate right.

And so to the four. I still don’t know who they are, but one  is wearing a railwayman’s cap with the letters CLC, for the Cheshire Lines Committee which will take me down the route of searching out their staffing records.

The two in the doorway judging by their clothes may be clerical staff which I is confirmed by the sheaf of papers held by one of them.

So the brick hut will be connected to the Public Weighing machine, these are employees of the railway and we are down by the station in what is now the car park of the supermarket.

And looking back at the directories for the years before 1911 there is evidence that the number of coal merchants has grown reflecting I suspect how populous Chorlton was becoming and how successful had been the railway in the 20 or so years since it was opened.

And not long after this was posted I got one of those helpful comments from John Anthony Hewitt "Not really a public weighing machine Andrew Simpson, although it could have been used for that purpose as well as railway duties. 

It was most likely used for sale of coal and other materials, by weight, to local merchants. 

They would weigh-in empty wagons, weigh-out the same wagons laden with coal, etc., and calculate the bill. 

The person holding the papers could be one of the merchants judging by the non-railway style of hat being worn. 

He is also looking slightly bemused [at the bill], whereas the railway clerk has a broad smile on his face."

Location; Chorlton

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, 1911

The lost Eltham & Woolwich pictures ...... no.15 watching the Ferry

A short series on the pictures of Eltham and Woolwich in 1976.

For four decades the pictures I took of Eltham and Woolwich in the mid ‘70’s sat undisturbed in our cellar.

But all good things eventually come to light.

They were colour slides which have been transferred electronically.

The quality of the original lighting and the sharpness is sometimes iffy, but they are a record of a lost Eltham and Woolwich.

Location; Woolwich

Picture; Woolwich circa 1976, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

“the green fields of one summer are the roads and avenues of the next.”

This picture of Oswald Road perfectly sums up what we had become by the early decades of the 20th century.  

For most of the early and mid 19^th century we had been a small rural community growing food for the markets of Manchester.

But with the coming of mains water, a gas supply and later a railway station we were quickly transformed in to a suburb of the city.

It was as the Manchester Evening News commented in the September of 1901 so swift a development that “the green fields of one summer are the roads and avenues of the next.”

And something of just how quickly the roads and avenues appeared can be got from the street directories for the early 20^th century.  These were not unlike our telephone directories in that they listed the householder in each road, street and avenue, with the added bonus that they often give the occupation.

And as I write I am looking at the directories for the three years of 1901, 09 and 11 and have chosen that collection of roads around Oswald Road.  Here is a remarkable story of piecemeal building as speculative builders vied with each other to build anything from a single house, to a semi up to a terrace. 

The development is patchy and is partly conditioned by changing land use.  So on the corner of Oswald and Longford Roads, what was once open ground, became a skating rink and later a row of eight semi detached houses built I guess sometime after 1916 and more likely in the years after the Great War.

In some ways these first inhabitants must have felt a little like pioneers, with views across the fields towards Turn Moss uninterrupted by other houses. Well, until the brick works arrived but that is another story.

The fun thing to do is to go and look for yourself.  Armed with copies of the1893 and 1907 OS maps and with just a little knowledge of building styles it is possible to distinguish the large Victorian piles from the Edwardian semis and terraces and the speculative in fill of later decades.

But it occurs to me that in all the stories of the new rows of houses, and the reasons for the rapid development of Chorlton at no time have I presented that population increase and so here it is.

Pictures; Oswald Road from the Lloyd collection, detail of 1907 OS map and the changes in population from 1841-1911.